Recipes For Success

Debbie Vanni Spends Her Days Cooking Up Ways To Win Contests

October 31, 1993|By Barbara Revsine. Special to the Tribune.

Nothing in Libertyville homemaker Debbie Vanni's standard-issue, circa 1977 kitchen would indicate that she's one of the nation's most successful amateur cooks, a veteran of innumerable cooking contests whose earnings from those contests, including vacations, were one year valued at more than $20,000.

Her basement, however, is another matter altogether. There, covering an entire wall, is a veritable library of cookbooks, including every single volume in the Pillsbury Bake-Off series and her grandmother's first edition "Fannie Farmer Cookbook."

Also present are computer discs containing analyses of judging trends and detailed histories of past contests. Files are crammed with recipes collected from myriad sources, all neatly organized into categories and subcategories, then further subdivided according to ingredients and ethnic origins. And then there are the shelves filled with cookie cutters, pots and baking tins in every conceivable size and shape.

Across the room is a coffeetable covered with neatly clipped announcements of coming contests and still-relevant copies of the Cooking Contest Newsletter, a chatty, South Carolina-based publication that has become a bible for budding and veteran contestants alike.

Surveying the scene, Vanni, 41, said, "This is where it all begins. Winning contests is like any other business: To be successful, you have to know your market." In this case, "knowing your market" begins with a thorough knowledge of consumer trends.

Food companies, local festivals and trade associations sponsor most of the contests Vanni enters, and their target market consists of home cooks.

"Judges are looking for recipes with broad appeal," Vanni explained. "For example, Mexican and Italian dishes do very well because these cuisines are popular with the general population. There's also a lot of interest in a catch-all category called Mediterranean as well as in regional American cooking, especially dishes that update traditional favorites by decreasing their fat and cholesterol content. And for the most part, it's always a good idea to avoid using hard-to-find or very costly ingredients."

Mary Alice Powell, food editor of the Toledo Blade newspaper for 40 years, is a veteran cooking contest judge. Familiar with Vanni's career, she said, "Debbie is extremely well-organized; she definitely does her homework. Her recipes are timely, without being too avant-garde, and she has both a thorough knowledge of food and a sincere interest in cooking."

Conveniently enough, Vanni's culinary preferences parallel popular tastes. Good basic home cooking, done with lots of fresh produce and perhaps an ethnic twist or two, dominates her menus-dishes such as oven-baked chicken seasoned with soy sauce and fresh herbs, or spaghetti sauce made with home-grown plum tomatoes and basil.

And in an era when many home cooks have only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking terminology, Vanni has a knack for writing easy-to-understand recipes.

Her prize-winning tropical grilled flank steak with fruit salsa is typical. The recipe, which won the $2,500 first prize at the 1987 National Beef Cook-Off in Sun Valley, Idaho, begins with a simple-to-do marinade made with chili sauce. Because it uses an especially lean cut of beef, the recipe supports the beef industry's contention that beef can play a prominent role in a heart-healthy diet. The accompanying fruit salsa is also geared to this strategy, because it adds flavor and pizazz without sending the dish's calorie or fat count soaring.

A spinoff done for a subsequent Del Monte Foods contest substitutes the juice from the requisite canned stewed tomatoes for the chili sauce and uses the reserved tomatoes as the base for the salsa. Her flank steak with tomato-corn relish won the $3,000 first prize.

While the research process is relatively easy to explain, the creative one is not.

Vanni has been cooking since she was 8, and she can't remember a time when she wasn't interested in food. At a recent reunion of high school friends in Oklahoma City, the first question she was asked was, "Did you bring your chocolate chip cookies?"

Because her engineer father, Robert Kidd, who died 13 years ago, was a lay missionary at the Elmhurst Methodist Church, the family often hosted foreign visitors, many of whom took turns preparing dinner. One Cuban family was particularly memorable, and Vanni still uses the husband's recipe for arroz con pollo (chicken with rice). But it was from her grandmother, Pauline Lamb, who died two years ago at age 94, that Vanni learned the basics, including the secret to making flaky pie crusts and meltingly tender cinnamon rolls, lessons that have stood her in good stead.

"It really was the best of both worlds," she said. "I absorbed it all, the homestyle as well as the ethnic."